1. Monday, Mar. 22, 2021; 7 pm PDT (9 pm CDT, 10 pm EDT: No program today.
2. Tuesday, Mar. 23, 2021; 7 pm PDT (9 pm CDT, 10 pm EDT): We welcome back Robert Zimmerman for updates on commercial space and other important and timely news events & stories.
3. Wednesday, Mar. 24, 2021: Hotel Mars TBA pre-recorded. See upcoming show menu on the home page for program details.
4. Thursday, Mar. 25, 2021; 7-8:30 pm PDT (9-10:30 pm CDT, 10-11:30 pm EDT): No program today.
6. Sunday, Mar.28, 2021; 12-1:30 pm PDT (3-4:30 pm EDT, 2-3:30 pm CDT): We welcome back both Leonard David and Barbara Sprungman-David for special news and policy insights only possible with these guests.
Some recent shows:
** Mar.21.2021 – Open Lines program– David Livingston says, “Robert Jacobson started us out with another NewSpace Commercial Space Report plus we took several callers on various topics.”
A sampling of links to recent space policy, politics, and government (US and international) related space news and resource items that I found of interest (find previous space policy roundups here):
1) Some news from Hangsheng Satellite, including an upcoming launch next month … 2) Starwin Completes Testing of Ka-band Phased Array Antenna … 3) CASICloud announces an RMB 2.63 billion round of funding …
USAF JAG and space lawyer Bryant Baker is back on the Make Space Boring News show to discuss his new article, Moon Wars. Is there a framework for predicting, understanding and handling conflict on Luna? As great powers are heading straight for precious resource locations on our Moon, what mechanisms are in place if any, and what do we need to create, to resolve conflicts before they get to war as a solution? This discussion and article are part of an essential education that our policy makers must experience so we do not fall into the war traps of previous generations. Bryant’s article, Moon Wars: https://www.coldstarproject.com/moonw… Space Law and Policy website: https://spacelawandpolicy.com/
** Quantum Communications, “Spooky” Quantum Entanglement, and Applications in the Space… – Constellations Podcast
In this episode of Constellations, we first get a primer about quantum physics and quantum technology, then a discussion about the growing field of quantum communications, and how it applies to the space industry. There are only a handful of companies specializing in this technology, including SQT, a company that claims to transform the world’s networks for the quantum revolution. SQT CEO David Mitlyng joins us to explain the ins and outs of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), applications in Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT), and quantum communications’ defense implications.
In this session of Space Cafè “Moriba’s Vox Populi #03” Dr. Moriba Jah talked about religion, ethics and space, and sustainability with Brother Guy Consolmagno – Director, The Vatican Observatory. (Catholic perspective), Harel Ben-Ami – Delegate, Israel Space Agency to the United Nations. (Jewish perspective), Ari Leon – Senior Project Planning and Control Analyst, Parker Aerospace. (Buddhist perspective), Hdeel Abdelhady – Professorial Lecturer in Law, George Washington University (Islamic perspective), Andreas Losch – Faculty of Theology, University of Bern, Switzerland and Editor-in-Chief, Dialog Theology & Science. (Protestant perspective).
Moriba’s Vox Populi is a disruptor in the current growing ocean of webcasts!
Here is the latest episode in NASA’s Space to Ground weekly report on activities related to the International Space Station:
** Space Station Crew Relocate Soyuz Spacecraft – NASA
Watch three residents of the International Space Station fly their spacecraft to a new port on the station, making room for the future arrival of the next set of crew members. Astronaut Kate Rubins of NASA and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos will undock their Soyuz MS-17 from the Earth-facing port of the station’s Rassvet module at 12:38 p.m. EDT, and dock again at the space-facing Poisk docking port at 1:07 p.m. This will be the 15th overall Soyuz port relocation, and the first since August 2019.
** Expedition 64 Inflight with Good Day L A and WBZ TV Boston – March 18, 2021 – NASA Video
Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 64 Flight Engineers Kate Rubins and Victor Glover of NASA discussed life and research on the orbital laboratory during a pair of in-flight interviews March 18 with Fox 11’s “Good Day L.A.” broadcast and WBZ-TV in Boston. Rubins and Glover are in the final stretch of their respective missions on the station with Rubins scheduled to return to Earth on April 17 on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and Glover scheduled to return from the complex a few days later aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle.
** Expedition 65 Crew News Conference – Mark Vande Hei – March 15, 2021 – NASA Video
NASA Astronaut Mark Vande Hei participated in a live news conference at 11 a.m. EDT on Monday, March 15, from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, to discuss his upcoming mission. Vande Hei, along with cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, are scheduled to launch Friday, April 9, on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They will serve as flight engineers and members of the Expedition 64/65 crew aboard the International Space Station.
** Spacewalk to Conduct Maintenance Outside the International Space Station – NASA
Rise n’ grind – it’s spacewalk time. On March 13, NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins will set their spacesuits to battery power at 7:30 a.m. EST (12:30 p.m. UTC) to mark the start of a 6.5 hour excursion outside the International Space Station. This is not the duo’s first rodeo. They’ll be building on system upgrades from their Jan. 27 spacewalk, as well as servicing the station’s cooling system and communications gear.
This image shows an artist’s impression of winds in Jupiter’s stratosphere near the planet’s south pole, with the blue lines representing wind speeds. These lines are superimposed on a real image of Jupiter, taken by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Jupiter’s famous bands of clouds are located in the lower atmosphere, where winds have previously been measured. But tracking winds right above this atmospheric layer, in the stratosphere, is much harder since no clouds exist there. By analysing the aftermath of a comet collision from the 1990s and using the ALMA telescope, in which ESO is a partner, researchers have been able to reveal incredibly powerful stratospheric winds, with speeds of up to 1450 kilometres an hour, near Jupiter’s poles. Credits: ESO
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, a team of astronomers have directly measured winds in Jupiter’s middle atmosphere for the first time. By analysing the aftermath of a comet collision from the 1990s, the researchers have revealed incredibly powerful winds, with speeds of up to 1450 kilometres an hour, near Jupiter’s poles. They could represent what the team have described as a “unique meteorological beast in our Solar System”.
Jupiter is famous for its distinctive red and white bands: swirling clouds of moving gas that astronomers traditionally use to track winds in Jupiter’s lower atmosphere. Astronomers have also seen, near Jupiter’s poles, the vivid glows known as aurorae, which appear to be associated with strong winds in the planet’s upper atmosphere. But until now, researchers had never been able to directly measure wind patterns in between these two atmospheric layers, in the stratosphere.
Measuring wind speeds in Jupiter’s stratosphere using cloud-tracking techniques is impossible because of the absence of clouds in this part of the atmosphere. However, astronomers were provided with an alternative measuring aid in the form of comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, which collided with the gas giant in spectacular fashion in 1994. This impact produced new molecules in Jupiter’s stratosphere, where they have been moving with the winds ever since.
A team of astronomers, led by Thibault Cavalié of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France, have now tracked one of these molecules — hydrogen cyanide — to directly measure stratospheric “jets” on Jupiter. Scientists use the word “jets” to refer to narrow bands of wind in the atmosphere, like Earth’s jet streams.
“The most spectacular result is the presence of strong jets, with speeds of up to 400 metres per second, which are located under the aurorae near the poles,” says Cavalié.
This image, taken with the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope and the IRAC instrument, shows comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impacting Jupiter in July 1994. Credits: ESO
These wind speeds, equivalent to about 1450 kilometres an hour, are more than twice the maximum storm speeds reached in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and over three times the wind speed measured on Earth’s strongest tornadoes.
“Our detection indicates that these jets could behave like a giant vortex with a diameter of up to four times that of Earth, and some 900 kilometres in height,” explains co-author Bilal Benmahi, also of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux. “A vortex of this size would be a unique meteorological beast in our Solar System,” Cavalié adds.
Astronomers were aware of strong winds near Jupiter’s poles, but much higher up in the atmosphere, hundreds of kilometres above the focus area of the new study, which is published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Previous studies predicted that these upper-atmosphere winds would decrease in velocity and disappear well before reaching as deep as the stratosphere.
“The new ALMA data tell us the contrary,“
says Cavalié, adding that finding these strong stratospheric winds near Jupiter’s poles was a “real surprise“.
The team used 42 of ALMA’s 66 high-precision antennas, located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, to analyse the hydrogen cyanide molecules that have been moving around in Jupiter’s stratosphere since the impact of Shoemaker–Levy 9. The ALMA data allowed them to measure the Doppler shift — tiny changes in the frequency of the radiation emitted by the molecules — caused by the winds in this region of the planet.
“By measuring this shift, we were able to deduce the speed of the winds much like one could deduce the speed of a passing train by the change in the frequency of the train whistle,”
explains study co-author Vincent Hue, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in the US.
In addition to the surprising polar winds, the team also used ALMA to confirm the existence of strong stratospheric winds around the planet’s equator, by directly measuring their speed, also for the first time. The jets spotted in this part of the planet have average speeds of about 600 kilometres an hour.
The ALMA observations required to track stratospheric winds in both the poles and equator of Jupiter took less than 30 minutes of telescope time.
“The high levels of detail we achieved in this short time really demonstrate the power of the ALMA observations,” says Thomas Greathouse, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in the US and co-author of the study. “It is astounding to me to see the first direct measurement of these winds.”
[ Cavalié says, ]
“These ALMA results open a new window for the study of Jupiter’s auroral regions, which was really unexpected just a few months back,” […]
[ Greathouse adds, ]
“They also set the stage for similar yet more extensive measurements to be made by the JUICE mission and its Submillimetre Wave Instrument,” […]
referring to the European Space Agency’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, which is expected to launch into space next year.
ESO’s ground-based Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), set to see first light later this decade, will also explore Jupiter. The telescope will be capable of making highly detailed observations of the planet’s aurorae, giving us further insight into Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Amazing image of Jupiter taken in infrared light on the night of 17 August 2008 with the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD) prototype instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. This false colour photo is the combination of a series of images taken over a time span of about 20 minutes, through three different filters (2, 2.14, and 2.16 microns). The image sharpening obtained is about 90 milli-arcseconds across the whole planetary disc, a real record on similar images taken from the ground. This corresponds to seeing details about 300 km wide on the surface of the giant planet. The great red spot is not visible in this image as it was on the other side of the planet during the observations. The observations were done at infrared wavelengths where absorption due to hydrogen and methane is strong. This explains why the colours are different from how we usually see Jupiter in visible-light. This absorption means that light can be reflected back only from high-altitude hazes, and not from deeper clouds. These hazes lie in the very stable upper part of Jupiter’s troposphere, where pressures are between 0.15 and 0.3 bar. Mixing is weak within this stable region, so tiny haze particles can survive for days to years, depending on their size and fall speed. Additionally, near the planet’s poles, a higher stratospheric haze (light blue regions) is generated by interactions with particles trapped in Jupiter’s intense magnetic field. Credits: ESO
4. Thursday, Mar. 18, 2021; 7-8:30 pm PDT (9-10:30 pm CDT, 10-11:30 pm EDT): No program today.
5. Friday, Mar. 19, 2021; 9:30-11 am PDT (11:30 am-1 pm CDT, 12:30-2 pm EDT): No program today.
6. Sunday, Mar. 21, 2021; 12-1:30 pm PDT (3-4:30 pm EDT, 2-3:30 pm CDT): Dr. David Livingston will host an Open Lines program. “Everyone call us, we want to hear from you.”
Some recent shows:
** Friday, March.13.2021 – Amir Notea reported “on commercial space, innovation, startups and the like in Israel. We also talked about Israel’s commercial effort to land on the Moon, possible future collaboration with UAE, The Artemis Accords and more.”
